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Blake Snell was a great HS prospect, and added something on his way through the Rays’ minor league system. He was a solid MLB starting pitcher at a young age, and then, midway through last year and again midway through *this* year, he’s taken his game to another level. Matt Chapman was a solid prospect out of Fullerton State, with a brilliant defensive reputation that was partially marred by swing-and-miss concerns, enough that some teams wanted to take a look at him as a pitcher. He hit well enough in the high-minors, though those K rate concerns looked pretty apt. In his first taste of the big leagues, Chapman showed that yeah, okay, he had some holes in his swing, but with great defense and a developing eye, he wasn’t quite in the Joey Gallo category – he wasn’t THAT kind of all-or-nothing player. This year, he’s cut his K% significantly while maintaining the impressive power he showed last year. Those Ks have turned into singles, so his batting average looks nothing like Gallo’s, and of course he’s a gold glove 3B.

Mike Leake is exactly who the M’s acquired. Presumably targeted because of his remarkable consistency, Leake has given the M’s what they wanted: 30+ starts with a FIP and ERA right near 4, posting a solidly (but not dramatically) above average season. Teams *need* these kinds of performances, and in a baseball world defined by attrition, churn, and inconsistency, Leake’s acquisition stands out as a smart pick-up for a team that desperately needed someone to count on after trying and failing with Wade Miley, Yovani Gallardo, and Ariel Miranda. I don’t think you needed advanced stats to see Leake as a solid buy, not when the regular old stats looked remarkably consistent. Giving up essentially no talent to GET him was another solid win, as the M’s were willing to eat salary from a team that had Jack Flaherty, Carlos Martinez, Alex Reyes (whoopsadoodle), and Dakota Hudson on the way up.

It was a good process and a good result, but there’s a problem: it’s just not enough anymore. Teams ahead of the M’s are taking interesting players, especially those with a lot more variance in their potential outcomes, and developing them into stars. I have no idea what Ramon Laureano’s career will look like from here on out, but he was a laser-armed OF with serious questions about his bat, and had already washed out of an org that’s been brilliant at developing guys like this. With the A’s…well, you know what happened. Maybe it’s all a fluke, akin to Jeremy Reed’s debut with the M’s. But it’s happening so much now, and the M’s haven’t quite followed suit.

Mitch Haniger’s development, about which I spilled too many words yesterday, stands out as a local example, but his overall slash line looks freakishly like last year’s. He’s cut his own K% issues down, but fundamentally, the change that turned him from busted prospect to MITCH HANIGER happened in Arizona. We’ve seen some encouraging signs from Evan White, but the overall seasonal record isn’t greatly encouraging. We’ve seen solid improvement from Braden Bishop, and at least Kyle Lewis is healthy now. But this can’t *just* happen at the minor league level. This team needs the ability to watch major league players cut whiffs and increase power, the way the Astros have done with Alex Bregman this year, and the way they did with George Springer the year before.

So much of what’s gone wrong has been due to the unexplained collapses of Kyle Seager and Dee Gordon, whose BABIP luck took a serious turn for the worse. It’s great that Edwin Diaz blew his projections out of the water, and became what he looked like in 2016: completely untouchable. But it needs to happen on offense, and it’s not happening enough. The trade for Ryon Healy only made sense if the M’s could turn him into a fundamentally different hitter; to succeed where the A’s had failed. It didn’t happen. I don’t think the M’s get enough credit for Nelson Cruz’s remarkable, age-defying, late-career renaissance, but while they got what they paid for there, they need Cruz-level performance from someone who wasn’t already a league HR champ. Who’s it going to be? Is this team ready to do that? If not, the M’s will just fall further behind, a point that Twins’ GM Thad Levine made in this BP Q and A. There is no standing pat, there is no treading water. You’re either actively improving, or you’re falling further behind. It’s a dead horse I like to whack at, but the M’s need to figure out what they’re good at and do more of it. It’s not enough to be an OK, perfectly average, reliably Mike Leakean General Manager. The American League circa 2018-19 demands much, much more.

It’s time for one of this blog’s patented, not terribly beloved, meta-analytics posts. If posts on the differing WAR frameworks are your cup of tea, then boil the kettle and grab some cucumber sandwiches. If not, uh, the M’s and A’s are playing a mostly meaningless game tonight, one saved from instant irrelevance by the return of James Paxton.

A few weeks ago, this post by sports statistics Prof Ben Baumer came across my Twitter timeline:

Aaron Nola currently has a 9.2 bWAR and a 5.5 fWAR from @fangraphs, with no reported confidence intervals. If we want #sabermetrics to be taken seriously as a science as have to do better.

I looked at some of the responses, as it ties in to the big debate about confidence intervals that OpenWAR (Baumer was one of the developers of OpenWAR) and now Baseball Prospectus’ WARP have been leading since at least late 2017. But fundamentally, I skipped over it, because I think we’ll *always* have these big differences between a WAR framework based on RA9 (runs allowed) and one based on FIP (three true outcomes only). Aaron Nola had a ridiculously low ERA and a somewhat higher FIP, so… there you go. Similarly, James Paxton’s going to look much better in a FIP-based system than an RA9-based system, and that holds up, too. In general, things should line up a lot more for position players, and pitchers can have outliers like Nola.

As the M’s season winds down, many fans have talked about the positives they can take from this season. Despite the late collapse, and despite the M’s dicey short- to medium-term prospects, there should be some positives given how many games the M’s just won. And thus, I’ve seen a number of comments about Mitch Haniger and his ascension into a star player. I’ve loved watching Haniger this year, but I guess I’d thought of him as in a tier below the upper-echelon position players in the game, and while that distinction may be semantic, it made me go and see how the different systems rate Mitch. What I found was a distinction about as wide as the Aaron Nola example.

By Fangraphs’ WAR, Mitch grades out as the 28th-most valuable position player, at 4.4 WAR. That’s really good, and it’s driven by an excellent park-adjusted wOBA – a park adjustment that’s perhaps larger than it’s been in a while. But that offensive performance is partially balanced by some negatives on defense. First there’s the good ol’ position adjustment, which dings him for playing in an OF corner (mostly), and then there’s the actual fielding component, which at FG dings him quite a bit, especially for his performance when he’s NOT in an OF corner. What does Baseball Reference have for him? There, Haniger is the *9th-best* position player in the game at 6.3 WAR,* essentially tied with Christian Yelich of Milwaukee, and within a half-win of the Astros’ Alex Bregman. This…this is good company. Defense is a big part of this, as BBREF also dings him for being a right-fielder, but gives him 7 defensive runs. So is this all about defense?

Maybe not. Comparing the “value” tables at BBREF and Fangraphs gives us a very different idea about what Mitch’s batting stats mean for overall value. At the former, combining batting, baserunning, league, park, and position, Haniger comes out with 5.5 offense-based wins above replacement. This is clear, unambiguous star-level play, but even if we throw out defense, there’s still about a half-win or more of difference between the two systems. Maybe that’s within the margin of error (and if we had confidence intervals, we could check that), but these differences can really add up for players and it gets magnified at the team level.

Which team has the best pitching staff? By Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus, the answer is easy: the Astros, who’ve given up an absurdly low number of runs, and who do FIP-pleasing things like racking up strikeouts. By Baseball-Reference’s measure, it’s…the Phillies. How can this be? Well, I’d argue that it literally cannot be, but to follow the logic train here, the Phillies may have given up nearly exactly the same number of runs as the M’s, but that’s actually heroic work given that they pitch in front of one of the league’s worst defenses in many years. Once you account for opposition, ballpark, and, crucially, that defense, the Phillies are *actually* giving up about a run per game less than an average team would. Contrast that with the Astros, who are giving up 3.3 runs per game, but even an average pitcher would do pretty well in the pitcher-friendly parks of the AL West and with Houston’s defense. The gap’s not nearly as large as it is for Philadelphia’s.

This result implies something about the Phillies position players, and it’s borne out on the offensive side of the ledger: the Phillies position players – as a group – have played at replacement level all year. Rhys Hoskins, whom FG has at 2.5 WAR? Replacement level. If team defense is the weird trick that makes the Phillies pitchers’ completely average runs-allowed look amazing, then it’s got to be accounted for on the position player side, and boy is it ever.

A somewhat similar thing happens with the M’s, whose offense looks better by BBREF’s numbers than it by Fangraphs’. While Fangraphs’ has the M’s pitching staff ranked 10th in MLB, they slip to 14th in BBREF’s rankings. Baseball Prospectus has them 13th, thought they see them similarly in overall value as FG. Meanwhile, BBREF’s got the M’s 3 wins better on offense than FG. The gap isn’t huge, perhaps, but at some point, this Mariners front office is going to have to triage its needs for 2019, and these gaps add up. Essentially, these differences are large enough that, depending on the source, you could argue that the M’s should invest in their offense *first* or you could argue that they need to shore up their pitching staff.

If you work for the M’s (or Phillies), you’ll have your own internal data that can probably shed some light on this, but whatever it is, it will rest on some pretty fundamental questions of value, and THOSE assumptions will drive the output. This extended look at the gaps between the publicly-available sites just highlights how those slight differences in assumptions can drive massive differences in the final computation of value. This is obvious when you compare the distribution of pitching WAR between FG, BBREF and BP. Baseball Prospectus’ new DRA-based pitcher WAR is fascinating to look at, because it doesn’t really line up with either of the previous approaches. Using mixed models, it creates a per-plate-appearances run estimator based on a ton of different variables, from the park to the umpire. One of the issues many in this field have pointed out is that actual runs allowed gives a much wider distribution that many run estimators, like FIP. You can reduce error (and have solid correlations with future runs allowed) by narrowing the distribution; regression toward the mean is great, and it works, but it can sometimes feel like doing that just eliminates the differences between really good and really bad pitchers. Well, DRA isn’t going to have that problem. The gap between the best pitching staff in Fangraphs’ FIP-based WAR (tighter distribution) is 26 wins. In BBREF’s Runs-allowed system, it shoots up to 37 wins, with Miami running out a staff that’s a shocking 8 wins below replacement level. DRA-based WARP ups that distribution even further, at nearly *47* wins between the Astros and Rangers. They’ve got 5 teams with multiple wins below replacement level, with the Rangers coming in at an unfathomable 12.6 wins below what you’d get if you just swapped in the Tacoma Rainiers’ staff. I…I don’t believe that can possibly be true, but it’s nice to see a distribution that doesn’t minimize the gap between the Astros and, say, the Orioles.

However you set up your system, you’ve got to balance the reduction in bias from accounting for park, league, umpire, whatever, with increases in variance/noise. Everyone’s looking at the same basic data: the M’s have scored too few and given up a few more. But what you do with the data is essentially limitless. I just hope the M’s can figure out how to use that data to coax some real improvement out of their young hitters. Failing that, I’d just like them to get a real, meaningful picture of where they stand vis a vis their likely rivals moving forward.

* Baseball Prospectus, by the way, essentially splits the difference. Mitch Haniger isn’t 28th or 9th, he’s…17th. They’ve got Mitch as a plus defender as well, and given their higher replacement level baseline, his 5.5 WARP is closer to BBREF’s than it is to Fangraphs’ 4.4. They agree with Fangraphs on James Paxton, though, whose higher ERA hurts his value at BBREF.

So as you may have heard, the M’s were mathematically eliminated yesterday, despite crushing the Rangers. Jerry Dipoto has been about as forthright as he can be, as summarized in this TJ Cotterill article. They’ve seen the Yankees/Red Sox/Astros ascend into superteams who have more talent, younger players, and better player development, and then they’ve seen teams in the middle ground like Tampa and Oakland take steps forward, passing the M’s. While they’ve had awful seasons in 2018, it’s hard to assume the M’s will be better than Anaheim and Minnesota, too.

Dipoto’s right to point out that it’s been a successful season on the field, albeit one that hurts more than any successful year should. The M’s have been a better ball club than I thought possible. They also seem stuck. After years of being sunk by black holes – players far below replacement level – the M’s essentially fixed that problem in 2018. They’ve been hurt by a lack of high-end, superstar-level play. I’d hoped that Mitch Haniger would get there, and you can make a case he has, especially if you ignore some newfangled defensive metrics. But it’s tough when all the teams above them/around them have at least one player playing at an even higher level. James Paxton, Jean Segura, and maybe even Marco Gonzales showed flashes of that 6-7-8 WAR talent, but none’s been able to sustain it. To get to the next level, they’ll need further development from Haniger – which seems doable – and another player at that level – that seems a bit harder.

Today’s game likely marks Adrian Beltre’s final game in Arlington, where he’s become an org favorite/legend. Still would’ve loved to see what would’ve happened if Adrian played on the M’s *after* the walls moved in, or in the offensive environment of 2017.

It’s been a rough year for the Rangers. It’s hard to believe it was only a couple of years ago that the Rangers occasioned a bunch of “Can teams beat their run differential consistently?” articles by winning 95 games despite a run differential of just +8 (and which was negative for most of the season). A pretty clear rebuild started last year, when the Rangers swapped FA-to-be Yu Darvish for today’s #9 hitter, Willie Calhoun. They’d spent lavishly on FAs like Adrian Beltre, Shin-Soo Choo; they’d extended Darvish and Elvis Andrus, and they’d taken on Prince Fielder’s and Cole Hamels’ salaries. Injuries to many of this crew meant that some salaries weren’t movable, while Fielder’s injury forced him into retirement. Hamels and Darvish were traded, and at this point it’s clear that the Rangers aren’t trying to add more veteran presence.

All of that means they’re in a very different position than they were back in late 2014 when they hired manager Jeff Bannister to try to coax another run out of an aging core. Bannister did that to a degree, but after a meeting with team ownership, the Rangers fired him, seemingly out of nowhere, this morning. Old M’s manager Don Wakamatsu will now manage about 10 games. It’s a weird situation, albeit quite different from the one that saw long-time manager Ron Washington fired near the end of 2014 – the move that opened the door for Bannister. The Rangers are bad, and were bad last year. I’m not sure that anyone really had high expectations for the club, but I’m still pretty surprised to see a manager canned this close to the end of the season. Like Scott Servais, Bannister came in with the idea that he’d be the bridge between the analytics department and the players, but I wonder if the GM/owners wanted to get a bit more avant garde in the dying days of a lost season that Banny was comfortable with.

It’s sort of fitting that the first game of the post-Banny Rangers will feature a Rays-style “Opener” in right-handed reliever Connor Sadzeck. Sadzeck was a Rangers draft pick back when they were coming off an AL pennant, and he’s racked up solid K numbers in the minors, but couldn’t avoid walks or dingers. He’s got great velocity from a 6’7″ frame, but he could never put everything together as a starter, so the Rangers moved him to the pen. Even there, he never quite pitched up to the level his stuff suggested, but pitchers can often live by the BABIP as often as they die by it. After getting BABIP’d to death in AAA, he’s pitching around too many walks in his first few MLB innings by giving up essentially no hits on balls in play. He’s walked 5 and K’d 5, and there’s nothing in his performance record that gets you too worried about things, but then he’s averaging 97+ with a straight, almost sinker-y fastball, and he’s got a hard slider at 88 and a big breaking curveball at 79 that could be a real weapon some day. The fastball isn’t fooling anyone, but the slider sure is. This is a classic specialist profile, at least at this stage; he’s struggled with lefties for a while, but he can often give righties problems.

Since moving to the leadoff spot, Mitch Haniger’s been absolutely great, hitting for average and power and racking up key at-bats. This *should* have more of an impact on run scoring, but much of the team has scuffled just as their lead-off man got hot. With Jean Segura back, the M’s have the best 1-2 line-up positions they’ve had all season… and you can understand why the Rangers might want to use Sadzeck in the first inning to see if he can get past these two plus Nellie Cruz before handing it over to someone who could pitch a bit longer. For all of the potential the whole “opener” thing has to artificially suppress salaries, it really seems like it’s working. The Rays give up surprisingly few runs employing the strategy, and they only use it when Blake Snell isn’t pitching. They’re making the back of their “rotation” – guys like ex-M’s prospect Ryan Yarbrough – into legitimate MLB pitchers by putting them in positions to succeed. Remember it was the Angels’ righty-heavy top of the line-up (anchored by that Trout guy) that brought about this experiment in the first place, when the Rays used ex-closer and current ROOGY Sergio Romo to “start.” It’s weird, and I get why a lot of people don’t like it, but just like the shift, if you’ve got a lefty 4th or 5th starter and you’re facing a line-up with 2-3 tough righties at the top…doesn’t it make sense?

The top of the line-up is still righty-heavy, but the M’s may have overcompensated in making the bottom of the line-up so lefty dominant. It’s not a bad line-up – it’s probably the M’s best possible line-up overall – but the lefties are bunched up together starting with Kyle, and a lefty reliever may get a couple of innings in to deal with it.

Like Charlie Morton, Dallas Keuchel will be a free agent at the end of the year, and it’s not yet clear whether the Astros will make a big effort to keep him in Texas. As a former Cy Young winner, he’ll generate some interest, but as a low-velo, command-and-grounders guy, he won’t command the sky-high prices of the high strikeout pitchers. He’s been somewhat volatile in the past 3-4 years, but he’s been volatile within the “pretty good” to “great” range, which is not a bad place to bounce around in. The M’s have traditionally shied away from ground ballers, with Jerry Dipoto arguing they simply cost too much; the Cubs deal for Tyler Chatwood would seem to make that point AND serve as a cautionary tale. But of course, the M’s have plenty of money, and Keuchel’s kind of the polar opposite of Chatwood: he’s been consistently good, a results-over-scouting report pitcher as opposed to Chatwood’s velocity and not much else.

I’ve talked a lot about the Astros player development work, and Keuchel’s another great example. He throws 89, and had kind of established himself as a boring, near replacement-level starter for a while before suddenly turning great for a few years. No, he hasn’t been able to maintain Cy Young-like stats, but he’s been an excellent pitcher now for 5 years. The question is: what happens when he leaves Houston? Keuchel strikes me as something like an old MG or another cool, slightly culty car model that collectors and enthusiasts go nuts for, and which performs incredibly when tuned by a talented mechanic, but which may be a money pit for someone without highly specialized mechanical training. I don’t know much about either cars or acquiring free agent pitchers with poor fastball velocity, but it’ll be interesting to see what Keuchel’s contract ends up at. Same for the going-on-35-year-old Charlie Morton.

Today the M’s are going to have a bullpen day, and Matt Festa will start things off. Festa put up huge strikeout numbers in AA last year and has largely continued to rack up whiffs this year. Looking at his scouting report, it’s easy to see why. He’s got a mid-90s fastball, a sweeping slider, and then a curve and a change up. That’s a broad repertoire, one befitting a starter. Unfortunately, that’s not who we’ve seen in his admittedly limited duty. Festa’s come up with a fastball at 93 and a slider. And that’s essentially it. He’s thrown a couple of curves, no cambios. His scouting report at Fangraphs had *4* pitches with at least 50 grades (average), and now he’s your standard sinking-fastball/slider reliever. Simplifying can be good for a pitcher upon a promotion, but I’m not sure this is working: he’s got a single strikeout in the bigs. Is today the day he can take his mothballed change up out for a spin?

Postscript on the post yesterday regarding Josh James – someone on twitter sent me this explanation for his breakout: being diagnosed and treated for sleep apnea. That’s fascinating to me, but it seems a bit incomplete. At the very least, it probably greased the skids for any work the Astros did with him, but a jump in velo of ~ 8 MPH sounds like too much to attribute to sleep. But maybe not? Maybe I’d be 10X the blogger I am now if I slept properly.

Jeff Sullivan pointed out that for the first time since 2004, the NL has officially won the interleague series -the AL had dominated for 14 years.

I mentioned Josh James in yesterday’s game post, but feel like I may have sold him short. If you’ll recall, James was a 34th round draft pick with a solid but unspectacular career in the low minors until this year. Then, at 25, he suddenly laid waste to the high minors. Is this a funky delivery guy, a Tony Cingrani-type thing where minors hitters can’t see the ball and so a guy without much stuff racks up insane K rates in the minors? Uh, no, apparently not. Scouting reports and MiLB broadcasts noted that James sat at 95, and hit 97 with some regularity. He also brought a very good slider to the table, and thus overwhelmed minor league hitters by pitching like a closer for 5 innings at a time.

He made his MLB debut on the first of this month, and I was kind of curious to see what velocity we’d see once we had proper measurement and not stadium radar guns. It didn’t take long: the third pitch of his big league career registered at 101.6 MPH. While he wasn’t able to sustain *that*, he ended up throwing 91 pitches on the night, so this wasn’t some opener strategy where he knew he was only going to pitch 1-2 innings. James doesn’t sit 95; he sits 97-98. That’s just great, really good stuff. That’s…:cries softly:

He hasn’t been perfect, and his ERA has lagged his strikeout-inflated FIP the whole year (MLB and MiLB), but he’s struck out 17 and walked 4 in 10 2/3 IP. This’ll be his second start, and he’s now essentially proven he can be an asset at the big league level, perhaps giving them yet another reliever capable of triple digits as they face great offenses in the playoffs. Framber Valdez is a great story, as it seems just about impossible to get an MLB-quality starting pitcher from a 21-year old DR signing. But James is, if anything, even MORE of an outlier. Valdez came into the year on the prospect radar, albeit just barely. James was *nowhere*. Popup prospects are a thing, and every once in a while, a guy everyone had written off has a huge year, but often that’s due to injury, or it happens a year or two after the draft. It’d be one thing if he rode some crazy change-up or hidden ball delivery to great statistical success, but dude’s been throwing *at least* 95 all year. If you do that as a starter, prospect people will rank you, period. If you do that without walking people, you get those people very, very excited. Every single time. How did everyone miss this guy?

His fastball doesn’t have a ton of movement; it reminds me a little bit of Thyago Vieira’s, but there’s no huge sink or rise. The key to his success, it’d seem, is his control not so much of his fastball (though that’s good), but of his slider. Already in the majors, he’s throwing his slider for strikes at an impressive rate. If anything, I think he’s doing it TOO often. But the Astros turned a nobody into a guy touching 10-freaking-2 who can drop a slider into the zone in any count. God I love the AL West. Perhaps as overkill, he’s got a change-up as well, albeit one he’s not throwing all that often. Looking at the pitch fx/statcast movement numbers, I was instantly reminded of another brilliant cambio, and another time the Astros pulled some absolute nobody from their bag of nobodies and watched him slice through the major leagues: Chris Devenski’s. Devenski had a bit more rise on his fastball, but his change produced sharp sink, about 8″ less than his FB. James has the same 8″ gap, coupled with the same few inches of additional armside run on his change, which comes in around 89-90. It’s not getting the swings/whiffs I’d expect yet, though that may be due to the fact that he’s not hiding it all that well yet (his release point seems pretty different with it). All of that’s to say that James still has room to grow. Faaaaantastic.

The Astros pitchers have dominated this year, and they’re the primary reason why the Astros are headed back to the playoffs and may win 100 games again. Here’s a table of teams ranked according to how many total runs they’ve allowed. There’s no real attempt at controlling for factors like park, opponent, or even games played. This is the highest of high-level metrics. 11 teams have already given up at least 700 runs, while the Orioles are already well over 800. The Astros have given up the fewest, at an astounding 498, by a mile. The gap between the Astros and second-place Dodgers (who play in the NL, remember) is more than the gap between the second-place Dodgers and the 16th-place Pirates. They rank #1 in strikeouts, #1 in hits-allowed, #1 in K-BB%, #1 in ERA (by a mile) and #1 in FIP (by a mile). They’re lapping the field. Teams can content themselves with the knowledge that the gang probably can’t stay together after 2018, though. Both Charlie Morton and Dallas Keuchel are free agents after the World Series, and while the Astros could bring them back, they may want to focus on the line-up and finding a 1B. It’s possible that the staff responsible for these breathtaking numbers will look quite different next year. Regression is coming, as it always does. But you look at Josh James and think: the Astros don’t really need to care. Charlie Morton has essentially been step for step with James Paxton all year; Pax has the better FIP, Morton the better ERA, HR-rate and innings pitched. Charlie Morton could walk away from the Astros at the end of the year, and it barely puts a dent into their 2019 projections. How does this happen?

The M’s better figure that out. They’ve played the Astros very tough this year, and they’ve figured out a way to keep the Astros close, something no one could do in 2017. That’s got a ton of value. But the M’s can’t really compete over the course of a long season with a team like this, and if the Astros keep piling on unheralded pitchers who throw 100, it’s going to be like this for a while. Signing Charlie Morton might help, especially if he can help them reverse engineer some things, but more importantly, they’re going to need to jump start player development. Logan Gilbert’s now crucial to the M’s hopes of keeping the Astros within visual range.

The M’s were always in a different league than these Astros. Not in the literal sense; not since 2012, anyway. The defending MLB Champions simply had too much talent and too much depth to worry seriously about a challenge from the Mariners. Even when the M’s briefly took the AL West lead, it had more to do with the Astros’ injuries and the vagaries of small sample sizes than the sense that the battle for AL supremacy had been joined. Even the A’s, the latest team to make a run at the Astros’ crown, don’t seem to match up with them all that well. Despite their ridiculous run in the second half, the A’s simply can’t match up with the Astros’ starting pitching, though their line-up is starting to close the gap. But let’s put the big names aside – the real reason the M’s have (rightly) focused on the wild card is that everyone knows that the Astros will develop their own crew of MLB depth within a season, *even as* they’re able to trade pieces away to pull in, I don’t know, Gerrit Cole.

Today’s starting pitcher, Framber Valdez, is a perfect example. Valdez was signed at age 21 out of the Dominican Republic, an under 6-foot lefty without top-shelf velocity. That sounds like the background of org depth that kicks around the Midwest League if everything breaks right, but he somehow made his way to AA last year. Despite struggling with walks, he moved up the chain thanks to a worm-killing sinker and a solid curveball thrown around 80MPH. At AA though, his walk problems and issues out of the stretch seemed to doom him. His ERA was nearly 6, and while his K/9 was decent enough, he got hit too hard to profile as much more than depth – albeit depth who had already overcome long odds to make it to the high minors. Because these are the Astros, he overcame a horrific BABIP to torch AA, striking out over 11 per 9, and moving quickly through AAA. The walk issues subsided a bit and he was one of the minors top strikeout artists, just like his teammate and former 34th round pick, Josh James.

James, Valdez’ teammate this year in AA, is 25 and had reached AA last year. Like Valdez, he struggled with balls in play and walks, and as a slightly old-for-the-league 34th-round righty, I don’t think anyone had serious expectations for him this year. Then, this guy that didn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere (even Valdez cracked an org-top-20 list) started sitting 95, and struck out 171 minor leaguers in 114 1/3 MiLB innings. He’s now in the majors, where he’s been hard to square up, with 17 punchouts in 10 2/3 IP.

I don’t think Framber Valdez is any sort of wunderkind. He had to age out of being a kind at all just to sign a tiny-dollar pro contract. He’s got a good breaking ball and a sinking, er, sinker, which as descriptions go will work just fine for about 20,000 guys none of us have heard of. He DOES seem to be the best version of himself possible, and that’s what’s so difficult following a team that plays in Houston’s division. We can hand-wave the gap in current MLB talent aside, even though the Astros are much younger than the Mariners. You can’t hand-wave aside the fact that the Astros’ prospects are also far, far better AND that the Astros track record of developing players – both prospects and not – is just lights years ahead of Seattle’s. This, more than anything, is what the M’s have to figure out in the next year or two, a span that will see them likely lose a lot of the production they’ve had this year (Nellie and D-Span are both free agents, and there’s no way they’re bringing back both). They have nothing of note in the system beyond a player in the DSL and two prospects in High A and AA who have plenty of question marks. The M’s need a Framber Valdez. Frankly, they need a couple of years where the M’s get a Valdez and a Josh James at the same time. Of course, even if they do that, they’ll only be keeping pace.

Wade LeBlanc is arguably the M’s greatest player development story of the year, or at least, he’s right up there with Marco Gonzales. It’s kind of funny, as the two highlight two different ways of measuring value. Because he gives up so many HRs, Wade LeBlanc is never going to do well in FIP. By RA9-based WAR, LeBlanc is essentially tied with James Paxton. By FIP-based WAR, he’s below average. Marco’s been the opposite: his FIP is great thanks to a very low walk rate and moderate dinger proclivities, but for the second year in a row, BABIP and strand rate have left him with more runs allowed than FIP would predict. Does some of this have to do with the M’s not-great defense? Yes. You don’t want to penalize Gonzales for the (in)actions of his teammates, but if Wade’s figured out a way to pitch around an obvious weakness, you don’t want to ignore that, either. FIP’s more consistent from year to year, but we’re on year 2 of waiting for Paxton’s runs-allowed to drop down into alignment. Some pitchers consistently outpitch their FIP, and some consistently pitch worse.

Baseball is strange. The M’s came into the season reeling from Anaheim’s win in the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes. And despite injury and a spring so bad it became international news, Ohtani has more than lived up to his considerable hype. He’s clearly one of the best stories in the game, and comes into the game with a 162 wRC+ and 2.8 fWAR *as a designated hitter*. He’s also flashed elite stuff off the mound, and while we won’t see him there for a long while, he added another win off the mound in 51 tantalizing innings. Mike Trout remains Mike Trout, and today’s starter, Jaime Barria, somehow has more RA9-based WAR than Marco Gonzales, and is neck and neck with James freaking Paxton. There are plenty of reasons why it seemed like the Angels were better on paper, and thus it can’t be a total shock that the Angels run differential is +35, while the M’s is -42.

The M’s are 11-7 against their divisional rivals, and are looking to break the Angels’ spirit by concluding a four-game sweep today. So much has happened to make the M’s season feel like more of a failure than it is. I mean, the long term view here is still unclear, and pretty darn bad, but just looking at 2018, it feels like we should be having more fun. I completely understand why we’re not, but just for today, let’s enjoy the schadenfreude of beating the Angels comprehensively in this season series and blowing past them after they started off so brightly in April. We don’t get to have nice things, it’s true, but Anaheim’s nice things don’t get to go to the playoffs, either.

The latest Mariner to fall ill and miss a game is DH Nelson Cruz. Feel better soon, Nellie. Today’s line-up does not inspire a great deal of confidence, though I remain confident that the Angels bullpen will find a way to blow it if they’re entrusted with a lead. And frankly, today’s line-up is sort of watchable in the way a late Cactus League game is: will Vogelbach figure things out at this level? How can Gonzales make counter adjustments, and how does his stamina look after a long season? It’s not much, but I’ll take it.

Yesterday in a radio hit at AM 710, Jerry Dipoto talked about his frustration with the M’s second half and took some of the blame for their slide. Here’s an interesting quote from that interview, as posted in this story at MyNorthwest:

“We were in a position to do special things and we had a group that was playing together in a way that was so energizing for everybody around the team, and we watched it methodically and painfully be pulled apart over the course of these last two months – and it’s gotten worse as we’ve gone,” Dipoto said. “That has to be part of our decision-making heading into ’19, and frankly those are some tough decisions. We’re at a bit of a crossroads in looking at where we are as a club and trying to determine how we get to a championship level, because we’ve taken two steps forward and then three steps back – and that’s on us.”

I’ve spent much of the season taking issue with this roster construction and how they’ve seemingly thrown Felix under the bus at times. I’m not always trying to give Jerry the benefit of the doubt, but I think this was a great start. I’m not saying the blame here falls squarely on Jerry Dipoto’s well-tailored shoulders. I DO like the fact that he’s taking some responsibility, and I’m really interested to see if that manifests itself in different roster construction strategies this offseason. “We have a group of players, frankly it’s close to half our lineup since the midpoint of the season who just stopped getting on base with any regularity. … We have had roughly half our lineup just effectively disappear for half a season, and it’s really hard to score runs when only half of your lineup is working,” Jerry said on the Danny, Dave, and Moore show. That’s…that’s pretty specific, and it’s pretty obviously true. The issue, of course, is that they seemed to go out of their way to get hitters who don’t walk, which means if these guys (Healy, Gordon, Seager this year) don’t have hits falling in pretty regularly, then they’re just making tons of outs. That’s exactly what we’re seeing.

Dee Gordon’s been abysmal in the second half, with a wRC+ of 57 and a batting average (his big skill, remember) of .239. Ryon Healy’s average and K:BB ratio are better in the 2nd half (how could they NOT be?), but his overall production has dipped because more of his hits have been singles. This sucks, and it’s unfortunate that it’s happening in the 2nd half when Oakland’s surged, but at the same time, these guys are *going* to be streaky.

Another thing that’s come out of that has been an acknowledgement that team chemistry has nose dived along with their playoff odds. Score another one for the “chemistry follows winning, it doesn’t CREATE winning” crowd, perhaps. But in light of everything that’s happened, I do wonder how Dee Gordon’s viewed in the clubhouse, especially after the dust-up with Jean Segura. Similarly, I wonder what folks think of Segura after the fight, being obliquely but clearly shamed by his manager for taking himself out of a game due to foot pain, and then missing games with illness. To be clear: I’m not trying to shame him for those things, but I just wonder how he’s viewed in there. Neither Gordon nor Segura are likely to move in the offseason, unless Dipoto is very, very serious about trying to bolster OBP.

I wonder if those comments aren’t directed so much at Healy/Gordon/Seager, but at long-time hitting coach Edgar Martinez. I wonder if part of this is laying the groundwork for a separation from the guy who’s name is on the damn street, and whose name graces a restaurant inside the stadium. Edgar was essentially the only staff member retained by Dipoto, and their line-up has lagged behind their pitching staff in production this year. It used to be that GMs would fire a hitting coach to slake public thirst for change, any change, after a painful slide like this. That was never going to be the case here, but I do wonder if Dipoto thinks Edgar hasn’t done enough to develop some patience or…something in his charges this year.

Mike Leake is putting the finishing touches on the most Mike Leake season ever. He has a career FIP of 4.13, but this year that’s shot up all the way to…4.14. His ERA is right at 4, very close to his career average of 4.11. Mike Leake is perhaps the most freakishly consistent pitcher at the seasonal level I’ve ever seen, which is pretty wild considering how inconsistent he can appear from game to game or even month to month. He’s already topped 2 fWAR, and is something like an unsung hero on a team like this one that has needed some consistent innings out of the rotation like few other clubs. That’s great, and Mike’s been worth every penny they’ve given him, and it’ll be nice to have someone like him in the rotation in 2019.

Having said all of that, can you imagine being fired up to watch Mike Leake face Odrisamer Despaigne, cast off by the Florida Marlins AAA club and picked up and sent straight to the bigs by the Angels? I think the Angels season can be aptly summed up in the pitching probables here. If you’re reaching for Despaigne, something’s gone horribly, irreversibly, wrong. It’s September of a contending year (albeit past-tense contention now) and there are no prospects playing, just Mike Leake (known quantity) versus Odrisamer Despaigne (known, bad, quality). I…I realize we’re all at that point of disconnecting from the 2018 M’s, and every once in a while I try to fight that off by looking at something underlying a player or the team’s predicament as a whole. Today, I’ve got nothing.

Well, OK, not *nothing*. Jeff Sullivan wrote a cool article at FG the other day about the Mets’ home park dramatically limiting BABIP, and doing so, at least potentially, by limiting exit velocities. It interests me because it seems so akin to Safeco; HRs were really hard to hit at Citi field when they opened it, so they did a big change of the OF dimensions in 2012 or so, around the time that Safeco’s outfield got pulled in. Both parks are now ~ average-ish for HRs (more so Citi than Safeco in 2018), but now it’s very hard for fly balls to find a hole in the smaller outfields. That’s a known factor; it’s not news to teams at this point. But the effect seemed to be to dramatically weaken the Mets’ home field advantage. Their winning percentage at home minus their winning percentage on the road from 2012-2018 was the lowest in baseball, and in fact was the only negative in the game. Just above them, and the only team within miles of them, is the M’s.

To be fair, much of this stems from the tail end of the Zduriencik years, where the club struggled mightily everywhere, but *especially* at home. The weird effects brought on by the new hyped-up baseball seemed like they could destroy the M’s, as Jerry Dipoto didn’t factor in the rabbit ball when targeting Wade LeBlanc (the first time), Drew Smyly, etc. In his defense, they’ve actually performed better at home in his tenure as GM, but it *does* make you question – again – the strategy of building an offense around base hits. I raised this when the M’s got Dee Gordon, but there seemed to be a concerted effort to avoid walks when bringing in offensive players, and the idea was that you’d just trade walks (and some homers) for a bunch more singles. That’s risky when pitchers now strike out so many batters, and when teams have tons of relievers capable of throwing 98, WITH the platoon advantage to neutralize your string-hits-together strategy in the late innings. But to run this strategy *in Safeco* seemed to be piling risk on top of risk. The M’s team batting average of .263 is the product of hitting .263 on the road, but just .243 at home. Sure, they’re not as heavily punished for that lower performance, because Safeco has a lower run environment, making each out slightly less costly. But at the macro level, at 30,000 feet, the M’s built their club *against* their home park, and they’re getting hammered for it.